Our survey of how interaction is conducted with linguistic resources (Part I) and how linguistic resources are deployed in interaction (Part II) would be incomplete were we not to consider the implications of these findings for language theory. What characterizes language in this view? What new light can Interactional Linguistics cast on age-old questions concerning language structure, language variation, language diversity, and language universals? These are some of the issues we address in this chapter.

Language in an Interactional Linguistic Perspective

For interactional linguists language is above all a form of social behavior. It is an inherently interactional activity observable in social encounters between human beings. It not only exists in the minds of its users but is materialized in their communication with one another. As one means of communication, language in this understanding is deployed along with other resources (visible, haptic, olefactive) in a semiotic ecology for communicative purposes.

As a form of social behavior, language is discoverable through “close looking at the world”. This was one of the earliest insights of Sacks (cited in Jefferson 1985:26–27):

Sacks’ point is that observable fact is far richer than anything researchers could ever imagine. If we were to present imagined “observations” as findings, we would be constrained by what others consider plausible. But if our observations on language are based on what happens in the real world – and we can point to the conversational record to document them – they are empirical, and no longer constrained by plausibility.

Preface

We start from the assumption that social interaction in informal conversation between family members and friends is organized in fundamentally similar ways in the languages and cultures of the world (Stivers et al. 2009). For our examination of how interaction is conducted with linguistic (and other) resources, we can thus rely on the descriptive categories developed in conversation analytic studies of talk-in-interaction. These serve as a tertium comparationis (basis of comparison) and can be underpinned with detailed studies of the linguistic (and other) resources deployed to realize them. This is what practitioners of Interactional Linguistics have been doing since about the middle of the 1990s, for English and other languages.

In this part of the book we begin with interaction and ask how it is conducted with linguistic (and other) resources, comparing as far as possible the organizational details of talk in different languages. We start with the most basic mechanisms of conversation: turn construction and turn taking (Chapter 2) and repair (Chapter 3). We then turn to action formation and ascription (Chapter 4), followed by topic management and sequence organization (Chapter 5). In addition, in Online-Chapter B we deal with preference, and in Online-Chapter C we examine the display of stance and footing. In Online-Chapter D we discuss an interactional linguistic perspective on storytelling as a “big package”.

Prior to embarking on these topics, however, a clarification of terminology is in order.

If we assume that participants’ construction and co-construction of actions is what interaction is primarily about, what, then, is an action? Do all utterances in talk-in-interaction perform actions? If not, what other categories do we need? (For more detail on actions and action formation see Chapter 4.) Conversation Analysis distinguishes actions from the practices that are used to accomplish them (Schegloff 1997a). The action of initiating repair, for instance, is ordinarily associated with the use of questioning items such as huh?, who?, etc. and certain forms of repeats. When such formats are deployed for initiating repair, this is described as a practice.